Visual Strategic Planning.

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DoView® Visual Strategic Planning communicates faster than text-based strategic planning because it is based on using a visual DoView® Results Roadmap™. This is an example of the principle that 'a picture is worth a thousand words'. What’s more, if you need to change your strategy overnight, you can do this by just tweaking your priorities directly onto your Results Roadmap™. You don’t need to rewrite your whole strategic plan.

Once you, and your management team, have argued through and built your consensus Results Roadmap™, it functions as a concrete visual representation capturing your collective strategy. You then work directly with your Results Roadmap™ to ensure organizational and KPI alignment. This avoids the traditional risk of slippage between people's different mental models of your strategy and the various interpretations others can take if all they have to work from is a text-based strategic plan.

Below are the steps showing how you can develop a simple DoView®Results Roadmap™ for visual strategic planning using the example of a software company.

The board or executive team draw a DoView®Results Roadmap™

Below you can see the organization’s high-level outcome on the right. The colored boxes show the lower-level steps and each has a drill-down page beneath it detailing what is involved in that step. Compared to traditional drawing software, DoView® is optimized for drawing such models in real-time while you’re running a strategic planning meeting.

Please click on the boxes below with grey triangles to drill-down into this live web-page version of the DoView® Results Roadmap™

Below is the drill-down page for the purple box which is called Well-run corporation. You can prioritize which boxes you will be focusing on in the next planning period (e.g. the next year). Only 'A' priorities are marked.

Insert project or activity boxes into the DoView® Results Roadmap™

Now you can use our unique cross-page linking tool to link project boxes to the priority boxes they are focused on achieving

Review your results roadmap™ to make sure that you have ‘line-of-sight’ between your projects and priorities - the Holy Grail of 'organizational alignment'

This is the magic step in the process because it lets you see if you’re actually focusing your activity on your priorities. The DoView® approach is much more rigorous than the lose paragraphs of text that people serve up as a rationalizations in traditional text-based strategic plans.

The white number at the bottom of each box shows the number of projects that are focused on each box on this drill-down page. The Clarity about IP box does not have any projects focused on it. This means that it is either not a priority or at least one new project needs to be focused on it. In real-world visual strategic planning, there can be many more project boxes than in this simple example. The DoView® approach is scalable and can handle a significant number of projects or activities.

A poster version is used to show how projects have been mapped onto priorities

The poster below shows that the organizational alignment mapping has been done. The detailed consideration of whether there is strategic alignment between priorities and projects is done within DoView® software as shown above. In contrast to normal drawing software, these link lines can be drawn automatically by DoView® once you have made a link between any two boxes.

Generate a PDF listing of which boxes each project is focusing on

If you right-click on any project box in DoView® you will see a listing of the outcome boxes that are linked to it. Conceptually this means that you now have a standardized way of describing the outcomes that any project is focused on achieving.

This is a much more rigorous approach than the traditional project planning approach of writing an unstructured paragraph of text about the outcomes a project is aiming to achieve. In DoView® you are able to produce a PDF of this listing. Project staff can then use this listing as a checklist to make sure that their project is actually focused on the outcome boxes that were identified as its outcomes in the planning process.

Anyone can use the above DoView® software company visual strategic plan, with acknowledgment, for their own company and for their own for-profit or not-for-profit consulting work if they, or their clients, are using DoView® Software and acknowledge its use. Anyone can use it to teach anyone else how to use DoView® software. If you want to use it for other purposes please contact general@doview.com.